For John Henry Newman, religion is animated by an imaginative 'master vision' which 'supplies the mind with spiritual life and peace'. All his life, Newman reflected on this 'master vision'. His reflections on the moral imagination developed out of his understanding of practical wisdom, as characterized by Aristotle – the wisdom that 'the good man' has in living a good life. For Newman, the vision at the core of religion completes and perfects the intuitions of the conscience. John Henry Newman and the Imagination looks at how Newman's understanding of the moral and visionary imagination developed over the course of his life; and it relates his ideas about the imagination to his portrayals of religious experience, and vision, in his novels and poetry.

From his vantage point in the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman offers much needed clarity to the twenty-first century, an age characterized by significant tension between science and religion and by a marginalization of the humanities. As a philosopher, theologian, priest, and man of Letters, he sheds light on our modern age by distinguishing between the different ways reason functions in science, religion, and literature. During his time, in response to a looming crisis in both religion and education, Newman challenged the usurpation of reason by science and empirical philosophy. He affirmed the need for the opening of the modern mind to other equally legitimate ways of knowing and defended the kinds of reason cultivated in the liberal arts. Jane Rupert delves into John Henry Newman's perception of the magisterial function of the imagination in both poetry and our knowledge of God, contributing unique insight into the study of his thought and showing how well it serves us to study this important nineteenth-century Catholic thinker. She presents a deep reflection of Newman's thought on several fronts, including intellectual history, theories of knowing, the controversy between science and religion, the defense of the liberal arts, and the aims of Catholic education.

It has been said that John Henry Newman stands at the threshold of the new age as a Christian Socrates, the pioneer of a new philosophy of the individual Person and Personal Life. Newman's personalism is found in the way he contrasts the theological intellect and the religious imagination. Newman pleads for the latter when he famously says, in words that John F. Crosby takes as the motto of his book, I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God ...but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice. In The Personalism of John Henry Newman, Crosby shows the reader how Newman finds the life-giving religious knowledge that he seeks. He explores the heart in Newman and explains what Newman was saying when he chose as his cardinal's motto, cor ad cor loquitur (heart speaks to heart). He explains what Newman means in saying that religious truth is transmitted not by argument but by personal influence.Crosby also examines Newman's personalist account of what it is to think; he explains what it is for a person to think not just by rule but by his spontaneous living intelligence. Crosby examines the subjectivity of Newman, and shows how the modern turn to the subject is enacted in Newman. But these personalist aspects of Newman's mind, which connect him with many streams of contemporary thought, are not the whole of Newman; they stand in relation to something else in Newman, something that Crosby calls Newman's radically theocentric religion. Newman is a modern thinker, but not the modernist he is sometimes mistaken for. The inexhaustible plenitude of Newman derives from theunion of apparent opposites in him: the union of his teaching on the heart with his theocentric teaching, of the subjectivity of experience with the objectivity of revealed truth. Crosby writes for a broad non-specialist public just as Newman did.

How is Kenneth Starr's extraordinary term as independent counsel to be understood? Was he a partisan warrior out to get the Clintons, or a saviour of the Republic? An unstoppable menace, an unethical lawyer, or a sex-obsessed Puritan striving to enforce a right-wing social morality? This volume is designed to offer an evaluation and critique of Starr's tenure as independent counsel. Relying on lengthy, revealing interviews with Starr and many other players in Clinton-era Washington, Washington Post journalist Benjamin Wittes arrives at an understanding of Starr and the part he played in one of American history's most enthralling public sagas. Wittes offers a portrait of a decent man who fundamentally misconstrued his function under the independent counsel law. Starr took his task to be ferreting out and reporting the truth about official misconduct, a well-intentioned but nevertheless misguided distortion of the law, Wittes argues. At key moments throughout Starr's probe - from the decision to reinvestigate the death of Vincent Foster, to the repeated prosecutions of Susan McDougal and Webster Hubbell to the failure to secure Monica Lewinsky's testimony quickly - the prosecutor avoided the most sensible prosecutorial course, fearing that it would compromise the larger search for truth. This approach not only delayed investigations enormously, but it gave Starr the appearance of partisan zealotry and an almost maniacal determination to prosecute the president. Wittes provides in this account of Starr's term a reinterpretation of the man, his performance, and the controversial events that surrounded the impeachment of President Clinton.

John Henry Newman (1801–90) was a major figure in nineteenth-century religious history. He was one of the major protagonists of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement within the Church of England whose influence continues to be felt within Anglicanism. A high-profile convert to Catholicism, he was an important commentator on Vatican I and is often called 'the Father' of the Second Vatican Council. Newman's thinking highlights and anticipates the central themes of modern theology including hermeneutics, the importance of historical-critical research, the relationship between theology and literature, and the reinterpretation of the nature of faith. His work is characterised by two elements that have come especially to the fore in post-modern theology, namely, the importance of the religious imagination and the fiduciary character of all knowledge. This Companion fills a need for an accessible, comprehensive and systematic presentation of the major themes in Newman's work.

For John Henry Newman, religion is animated by an imaginative 'master vision' which 'supplies the mind with spiritual life and peace'. All his life, Newman reflected on this 'master vision'. His reflections on the moral imagination developed out of his understanding of practical wisdom, as characterized by Aristotle – the wisdom that 'the good man' has in living a good life. For Newman, the vision at the core of religion completes and perfects the intuitions of the conscience. John Henry Newman and the Imagination looks at how Newman's understanding of the moral and visionary imagination developed over the course of his life; and it relates his ideas about the imagination to his portrayals of religious experience, and vision, in his novels and poetry.